Word and Void

About the Word and Void series

Terry Brooks's Word and Void trilogy is his only Shannara-adjacent work set in the real, contemporary world, following John Ross, a Knight of the Word cursed with visions of a devastated future America if he fails in his mission, and Nest Freemark, a girl in small-town Hopewell, Illinois, whose latent magic and family secrets make her central to the hidden fight between the Word (order, magic, and the natural world) and the Void (chaos and corruption). Running with the Demon introduces both characters as a demon arrives in Hopewell during a single fateful Fourth of July weekend, hunting Nest before she comes into her power. A Knight of the Word picks up years later as an older Ross, guilt-stricken over a failure of nerve that let horrific violence occur, seeks out Nest again for a mission against a corrupted magician threatening a Seattle homeless shelter. Angel Fire East closes the trilogy as Ross confronts a former Knight of the Word turned traitor, with the stakes for both the real world and the future Ross has glimpsed reaching their peak.

Though it can be read as a self-contained contemporary fantasy trilogy, Word and Void is revealed -- across Brooks's later Genesis of Shannara books -- to be a direct prequel to the entire Shannara saga, explaining how a nuclear apocalypse in Ross's future becomes the post-collapse world the Four Lands eventually rise from.